The Roving Party Page 3

  Do you know guns, lad?

  I do.

  The other men shook their heads. He dont know nothin of the sort, said Horsehead.

  He has a knack for lyin, dont yer, said Gumm.

  They all watched the boy, shivering in his outsized clothes, glaring back at those men, daring them to come at him.

  Batman nodded his head and waved Gould over. He passed a weapon to the boy. Either way you’ll know it soon enough, he said.

  A wooden balance and a pack of iron weights were taken from the store shed along with the sacks of flour, tea and sugar. William Gould put the men to measuring the flour into ten-pound portions. Sugar and tea were split between the men at sugar three ounces a day and tea a half-ounce. Once packed these rations would feed them for a week as they walked the back country, forty pounds or more hauled in kangaroo-skin bags. Gould held the balance while the men cut down the portions then took their weight against an iron counter, the little sacks being tied off with twine as they were finished. Batman stood by in his heavy greatcoat sipping rum from his flask and supervising the work as it progressed.

  Do you have a name? Batman said to the boy.

  Thomas.

  Lad, you waste that flour and you go hungry.

  The boy brushed what flour he could off his arms into the open mouths of the portion sacks. The tendons showed through the skin of his neck as he looked up. His hair would have been a fair sandy shade but for being matted with muck and it sat square razored across his forehead. He gave the gravest of nods and went on adding flour to one side of the scales.

  Jimmy Gumm watched the boy also. He put down a sack of tea-leaves from which he was measuring, spat in his hands and rubbed them over. Be a good boy and hand me another, he said.

  The boy paused in his work. I aint yer boy.

  No. You was mine I’d beat three colours of snot from you.

  The others laughed.

  What are you laughing at? said the boy. They looked at him and by turns they bent their heads back to their portioning. Jimmy Gumm leaned over and removed from the pile beside Thomas a little knotted sack. As he moved away he cuffed the boy once around the ear, a decently weighted blow that rocked the boy backwards, before Gumm returned to filling the bags with tea-leaves. Sheep wailed far off, their lonely mewling matching the boy’s low voice when he spoke. You wont touch me no more if you know what’s good fer you, he said.

  Wont I now.

  No.

  There was an eeriness about Gumm’s eyes, one of which wandered loose of the other. I know what he done, he said. I know what Jock’s Mal done to you. He done what he done to all the lads.

  The boy kept his face down. The other men watched him scratch his forehead and leave a track of flour there.

  He was puttin it around that lockup. Choice words they was too. Told to anyone who’d listen. Jock’s Mal said to me, he said, Jim, I never even got a squeal out of the little devil.

  The men laughed anew. The boy’s face remained blank as he worked from the flour sack filling the smaller one at his feet. He scooped up more and filled another sack, the drifts of powder rising about him as he worked.

  You’d best be careful, boy. Elsewise you might get more of the same out there in the quiet of the wilds. A young buck like you. This time Gumm wasn’t laughing.

  The boy ceased what he was doing. In one action he picked up his heavyended fowling piece and flipped it about and took it by the barrel. Two white handprints were left upon the stock. He stepped towards Gumm, moving like a man at some trifling matter.

  What’s this? Gumm glared up at him. But even while the words were shapes in his mouth the boy was bringing the butt down across his skull. As he raised his arms the boy swung again, full and heaving, and Gumm cried out. No one made any movement towards them. Thomas struck again. Blood ran freely from Gumm’s forehead. He scurried off across the bare earth on his hands and knees and the boy followed him. Whaling him over the back. Christ Jesus Christ Jesus, Gumm was saying.

  A final blow then Gumm went limp. The boy held the piece ready but brought it down no more. John Batman pushed back his coat and ran his eyes over Gumm where he was laid out cold in the muck.

  Turn him over so he dont choke at least, he said.

  The boy rolled the fellow over and stood looking down on the battery he’d done as the life inched back into Gumm. He walked back to his bags with the eyes of the other men on his every step.

  You save that for the blacks, said Batman. No bastard here wants to see it.

  The boy never even glanced at him. He went once more about the packing and weighing of flour, tying off each sack as he went. He kept himself tightly drawn but those men saw the jitter in his fingers and heard his quick breaths.

  The axe rang upon the fragrant hardwood and Katherine raised it once more and brought it down. The head bit deep and split the log evenways. She reached for one fallen half and sat the hunk again on the block where she cut that piece also into pieces, every sound of the axe coming back a second later off the mountain. She had a decent pile cut for Mrs. Batman’s stove and wanted only a few more for the fireplace. The handle rasped in her palms as her upper hand slipped down the polished wood. The blade passed cleanly through the log and buried in the block beneath. She stood there in the new silence, her hands still on the handle, looking across the grazing land. In her belly the baby struggled and she put a hand there to contain it.

  We’ll be back in a week or so.

  She turned around. Black Bill was standing with his hat in his hands, running the brim through his calloused fingers. She turned away and tugged the axe head loose of the block and brought the weight down upon a square of wood, the collision jarring her arms.

  Mrs. Batman will put you up here at night. In one of the huts.

  I go home.

  She pulled up the axe as Bill stood by watching her minutely. Over the paddocks the shepherds were rousing their flocks for the pens. Otherwise there was just the scratching of Bill’s hat in his fingers.

  And what if nine aint enough to take him? said Bill. What then?

  bungana Manalargena not hurt me.

  Woman, he’ll string yer limbs from the trees.

  No. I go home.

  Bill slowly exhaled. Think of the child.

  She turned to face him. I think. Always. But you, you follow Batman.

  He puts food in front of us. We are in his debt.

  Dont eat his food.

  Well, he said. I’m wasting breath here.

  He replaced his hat and headed down the grassy slope towards the little fire the new men had burning, around which they had gathered to brew tea.

  THE MORNING DAMP ON THE PADDOCKS was rising white in the sunshine when John Batman emerged from the treeline with his greatcoat dragging over the growth, his arms full of bits of bark and grass. He passed the store shed and the shambles still rigged with two lonely hanging ewe’s hocks and sat himself on the ground by the cook fire the men had burning. Black Bill was there, and Pigeon and John Crook of the Parramatta, all crouched at the coals drinking tea in tin mugs. Their dark faces studied Batman as he worked the bark hulls he’d been carrying out flat. They soon saw what he was about and John Crook reached into the fire’s gut and sorted through the coals for something of use to Batman. He placed a few choice embers on the bark and on the moss spread there and Batman rolled the coals and the bark into one long cudgel which he bound up with twists of grass.

  On the other side of the fire stationed away from the blacks the assignees studied the goings-on but it meant nothing to them. They picked at the boils infesting their necks and stared. John Batman blew into the opening and called the coals into life. They’d taken no breakfast but the smokes above the hill put an urgency into Batman’s planning.

  On yer feet, he said.

  The Dharug men led the party away from the farmhouse around the curves of the plains where the unburnt ground was dressed in saplings and the bracken grew as plush as grass. They made along the boun
dary of Kingston, tracking beside the wall of forest that rose sheer from the fields, until they reached the rim of Batman’s holdings. Here the stands of gums in blossom, the fiddlebacked acacias and the gauntly made myrtles blanketed the hillside as far as they could see. It was a stretch of forest entirely hostile to folk of any nation, native or not. That beggardly clutch hung in rags and animal pelts and toting rusted firearms walked that ground as if pilgrims guided by the word of a demented god.

  It was a hard slog that first morning. The terrain was overgrown and snow stood in the shadows lingering from winter. It was through old country they went, a thousand generations black. They walked hours up foothills and down gutters, passing through a draw of conifer stags burned out by wildfire where a raw wind stirred the branches. They wound through a gully strewn with charcoal that they crushed under their feet. In the distance the southern approach of Ben Lomond rose out of the forest clefts, its bald peak noosed in clouds, and they followed the Parramatta men ever towards it. Around noon they stopped to eat. Tree ferns made a vault overhead and the men crouched at their bases scraping leeches from their feet and waiting for food. William Gould had a bag of smoked meat for their breakfast which he distributed to every man until he had one last strip remaining.

  Give it to Black Bill over there, Batman said.

  Horsehead pulled his lip back in disgust. Why dont he eat them boots instead, he said.

  Bill worked the meat around as he leaned on his gun, the ligaments of his jaw flexing, his gaze on the old cur crouched across from him. He passed a water canteen back and forth with the Dharugs and spat mouthfuls, darkening the stones. They lingered a moment longer in the stand of tree ferns as the assigned men rebound their feet and once more lurched into the scrub.

  Now they pushed through regions of landslip where fallen trees lay mouldering in their furrows and saplings sprouted along the very boughs of the fallen. The rovers mounted those logs one after another and felt the sun on their heads before crossing again into the cold forest cavity. They walked up a talus and over runs of cragged stone burst forth from the earth like filthy cuspids, stones that foreshadowed the dolerite stacks of the mountain looming in their vision. As they slogged up and down corrugations in the country Horsehead fell in alongside Jimmy Gumm and spoke into his ear.

  Dont let that cat’s turd get away with it, he said.

  With what?

  Givin you a beltin that’s what.

  Gumm looked around at him.

  I mean a boy like that. It aint right.

  Up ahead John Batman turned to take a summary of his party. Horsehead was quiet for a few yards. But when Batman continued on he spoke again. Us old hands ought to learn him some respect.

  I dont need yer help, said Gumm.

  No, I dont reckon you do.

  I’ll see it done meself.

  There’s bugger-all to him. Just careful you dont kill the wretch.

  They filed on down a wooded swale where the groundcover dragged at their skins. Jimmy Gumm leaned in to speak in a whisper. When the moment presents I will have after him. You watch me back all right?

  My oath I will.

  But not until it presents, you hear.

  They walked all day and deep into the afternoon. As the circular sun carved into the hills they came to a shallow rock face which Batman bade them scale, one pulling up another until all stood on top. They scanned the stretch of country rolling around the bend in the earth away below. It was a sheet of bluish green. The native hunting grounds made a patchwork of that textured expanse where the grasslands showed through and the herds of kangaroo could be seen, turning as one upon the pastures.

  What had the men’s attention though was not the country but a twist of smoke hung straight in the still air, a few miles distant to the east of the mountain. Those unquiet faces staring. A cloud shadow crossed the forest like the silhouette of a ship’s hull moving over the seabed. They lowered each other down the rocks, making what they could of any handholds until their feet hit the hard ground once more. But Black Bill stayed on that lookout. Glaring at the crawl of white smoke etched large against the blue he was sucking a gum leaf between his lips until in time the men called him down, and he turned away to join them.

  THEY MADE CAMP AS THE LIGHT drained from the sky and it was a miserable camp set beneath a mountain pine that had grown around a rock and split in half. A copse of candlebarks grew nearby, aged like rheumatic fingers and thickly boled. Moss crept up almost everything and the fust of dead wood and mould filled the nostrils; mushrooms as round and white as skulls glowed otherworldly in the shadows.

  They piled up wood in the lee of that strange pine and Batman made a fire from his firestick and blew, banking wood on top. The assignees unwound the crusted bindings from their feet and placed the rags near the fire to dry, and in the throw of firelight the men hauled out their portions of flour and added a pound or so each to a communal damper that William Gould kneaded on a slab of bark. A wind picked up and no one spoke but each of them listened to the darkened forest beyond and clutched their loaded firearms across their laps. Soon Black Bill took himself from beside the fire and sat with Pigeon and Crook where they shared a pipe at a small remove from the rest. Bill stretched his legs out before him and in turn hollowed his cheeks sucking on the stem.

  How you come by them boots, friend? Horsehead was looking at him.

  Through honest labour. Friend. He spoke around the pipe in his mouth and the words came as white balls that pilled and dissipated.

  Huntin your own kind for bounty aint no sort of honest I know.

  You ought to shut your mouth about honest I reckon, said John Batman. A crim like you.

  Better born a crim than a bloody orang-outan.

  Batman leaned forward. I aint above cutting yer tongue out. My word I aint.

  Horsehead rolled back his shirt sleeves as if to demonstrate his credentials for just such a life and the firelight showed up the mare’s head inked into his pale prison forearm, baring its teeth, its mane streaming in the wind. His hands were inked over in outlandish devices amassed from the netherparts of the globe, some faded and ill-defined and others freshly needled into his skin. A silence stole over the camp as the assignees chewed their tobacco and gazed at those tattoos.

  The boy was first to speak. He looked at Batman. Have you bin this way before?

  I have, said Batman.

  The boy squinted through the faint rain that was now falling. Come after blacks was you?

  Bushrangers. Batman was shining like some river creature hauled freshly ashore as the wet leather of his greatcoat gave back the flames and he looked around at Baxter. Welshman, he said. More wood.

  There were a few moments of smoke and spark from the fire.

  But there’s more than bushrangers out here, continued Batman. There’s the clans. A good many.

  Can you find em?

  Batman stared at the boy. Be sure of it.

  And if we dont find no blacks, we’ll just haul that one there in and be done with it, said Horsehead and he cocked his thumb in Bill’s direction.

  Black Bill was by the split pine, keeping out of the rain. In his hands was the longbladed dagger he wore behind his neck. It was inscribed over in spiral patterns by means of a steel burin and honed viciously keen on a width of east coast sandstone. He turned the dagger point on his palm and kept his hat brim low so that his face receded in the shadows. They all watched him.

  What sort a damn ignorance makes you think we could haul him somewheres he hadnt a mind to go? said John Batman.

  Horsehead spat on the fire. I seen him with Bickle. He aint much frolic.

  What he is or what he aint aint for you to say.

  I know what I see.

  And that is all you know. I guarantee you. If you was to draw a bead on him, what do you think would happen? You think he’d stick up his hands?

  Horsehead sat in silence. Glowered.

  Pay attention to me now cause I’ll tell you what. He’ll
run you from balls to breakfast with that there blade of his. Spill yer innermosts over the stones before you so much as draw down the cock.

  The Vandemonian replaced the knife into the leather sheath strung between his shoulders and he tipped his hat on an angle to better meet the eyes of the assignees gazing at him across the wavering heat of the fire.

  A black man raised white, said Batman. Think upon that fact. Not a day passing where some slander aint spoken in his presence. How many times you suppose he has defended hisself? I tell you somethin else. He keeps account. I seen him break a man’s arm twelve months after the fact. This fellow had once drawn a blade against Bill, but he wont draw nothin again God help him.

  Horsehead spat a string of tobacco liquor onto the fire where it hissed and raised a stink like charring hair.

  I reckon even halfwits like you gang of dirts know of the Man Eater, said Batman.

  The men nodded at mention of Jeffries.

  You’ll likely have heard tell it was John Darke what finally caught him, said Batman.

  They nodded once more.

  John Darke I was told by some, said Gumm. But Jeffries give himself up. Boneless coward that he was.

  That aint the strict truth of the matter, said Batman. He was pursued by several parties but it was him, Black Bill there, caught the monster.

  Him?

  The selfsame.

  The Vandemonian leaned forward and flung the dregs from his mug over the fire. His wet clothes clung to him. I was a party to the taking of Jeffries, he said. But merely a party.

  The Man Eater told me it was you took him, said Batman. I was there too dont forget.

  Under the gaze of the eight men Bill filled his mug from the billycan. Rain fell from the limbs above, fell and vanished in the fire’s gut. They watched him crush a gum leaf into his tea and then stir it with a long black finger. A good many things come out of his mouth, he said. But for the most part they were lies or worse. I will tell you this much though. Then Bill began upon a history he’d recounted a thousand times in grog shops and stock huts and walking the trails of the back country.